Zabbix Review

Easy product with all the features you need but it would be nice if it had predictive trending.

Valuable Features

Low Level Discovery is imho the best feature in Zabbix. It will do some auto discovery of network devices, filesystems and snmp oid's.

Improvements to My Organization

If you are serious about your infrastructure then you have to know what is going on. With Zabbix we know when servers are using to much cpu, memory, disk IO, etc. Besides getting notified when something goes wrong, we are also now aware of how good our infrastructure scales, something that can save us money and frustrations.

Room for Improvement

Zabbix has it all except for predictive trending. This would be a nice extra feature. Also the SLA (it services) part can use some improvement.

Use of Solution

I've used the product for about 2 years now, the company I work for was using it already before I joined. About a year ago I passed the Zabbix training course.

Deployment Issues

Deployment of Zabbix is easy and very straightforward. The only thing to do is install clients on your devices that you want to monitor. And even that is not always needed. It is also possible to do some checking from the server side. Also, it runs on almost every platform available on the market today.

Stability Issues

Zabbix is written in C, developers have high standards before accepting code from the community. Zabbix itself uses little resources and is very stable.

Scalability Issues

If it scales then it is Zabbix. The only thing that can be in your way is the database and the hardware it runs on. As Zabbix uses a database you need descent hardware and a good DB if you have alot of machines to monitor with lots of items to check.

Customer Service and Technical Support

Customer Service: For us, as partner the support we get from Zabbix is great. We get answers quick and they always take our issues seriously.Technical Support: There is professional support from Zabbix SIA that can be bought. They even offer to develop custom features in Zabbix if you like. Of course there are also the Zabbix partners like the company I work for that can provide support.

Previous Solutions

Before I knew about Zabbix I was working at another company where we where using Nagios (opsview). Glad I had a chance to learn Zabbix, there is just no way to compare Zabbix. This is real time monitoring :)

Initial Setup

Setup of Zabbix is easy. There is a great manual how to install and use it on most of the systems be it with rpm or deb or from source. It's probably the easiest open source monitoring platform to install. Also there are almost no dependencies needed that are not in the os already.

Implementation Team

As a Zabbix partner and official trainer we of course did the setup on our own.

Pricing, Setup Cost and Licensing

The product self is free there is no hidden cost or no cost for a enterprise version or some features that get disabled later. The product comes 100% free and it stays that way.

Other Solutions Considered

In our company we are always following the latest trends on the market so we try to follow them all as much as needed. Our preference goes mostly out to Zabbix of course.

Other Advice

Tweak the standard templates and make sure you don't run the DB on a virtual platform.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.